Scarlett Johansson
Anywhere I Lay My Head
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Review - Scarlett Johansson
Reviewer: Kim Langcake
Rating:
A music industry record executive's office, sometime last year: "Scarlett Johansson, singing covers of Tom Waits' songs, we'll get David Bowie to guest, the guitarist from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's can join in . . . yeah, very cool, definitely a winner."
The idea of It Girl Johansson playing smokey chanteuse with Waits' bar-room dirges no doubt held great allure for Warner subsidiary Rhino Records, which has released Johansson's debut "Anywhere I Lay My Head". The combination of blonde femme fatale persona and a surprisingly deep baritone voice, displayed so winsomely during the karaoke scene of Lost in Translation, must have sounded great at the pitch, but unfortunately, reality struggles to match suggestion.
Produced by David Andrew Sitak (from TV on the Radio), "Anywhere I Lay My Head" often seems determined to waste the talents at hand. Johansson's voice is obscured by busy layers of effects and, on the few occasions it is mixed forward, sounds flat and monotone. Glorious Waits' songs such as "Fannin Street" and "A Town With No Cheer", delivered so perfectly imperfectly by their writer in his raw gravelly howl, seem to have been stripped of their rough, messy beauty and replaced with a disembodied, carnival music ambience.
"I Don’t Want to Grow Up", covered as a fast-paced pop song by the Ramones twenty years ago, is a wasted opportunity for Johansson to show some emotion. Scarlett, you're young, you're beautiful, you're a movie star, and you're 23 years old. If Joey Ramone could sing this song as though he meant it when he was forty, why do you sound like you're channelling your inner zombie?
Even the most moving Waits' lyrics have had the emotion drained out of them, such as the sad goodbye of "Green Grass": "Lay your head where my heart used to be/Hold the earth above me/Lay down on the green grass/Remember when you loved me". Surely an actress of Johansson's ability could have done something sublime with this beautiful lament, but once again, her voice is a droned whisper, never quite getting on top of the melody which we know is hidden in there somewhere.
Perhaps part of the problem is that one hears a Tom Waits song and expects to hear Tom Waits, and Johansson certainly deserves credit for not taking the easy road with her debut. The one non-Waits track, "Song for Jo", co-written by Johansson, is an elegant acoustic piece and maybe, just maybe, holds some promise for future offerings.
Minnie Driver, Keanu Reeves, Hilary Duff. I will admit to having taken a perverse guilty pleasure last year in William Shatner's brilliantly hammy cover of British band Pulp's "Common People", but the line of thespians-turned-recording-artists is generally long and sadly undistinguished. One wonders just what it is that makes record companies continue to fund these vanity projects, when no doubt their mailboxes are filled with countless demo tapes from talented artists whose only drawback is that they are bottom dwellers on the celebrity feeding chain.
So what's next? A music industry record exec's office, sometime in the not-too-distant future: "Lindsay Lohan, doing an album of Tibetan throat singing, we'll get Richard Gere to guest, Beastie Boys can do the backing . . . yeah, very cool, definitely a winner."
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